As I sat on my normal, everyday perch – the small rock at the foot of the hill on top of which is a temple with its saffron flag fluttering in the wind that always blows in the early part of the afternoon – and keep a watch over the buffalos who were not all visible now because they have wandered off in the vast jungle that stretched all around, I saw the man walking towards me from the end of the path. The path passed touching my rock – the rock actually butting into the path and covering about one fourth of it – and then stretched straight for about two hundred yards after which it took a slight bend towards the left. All around was silence punctured now and then and accentuated by the bells tied to the buffalos. So much silence that if a dead leaf falls, you could hear it touch-down. So much silence that, if you had ears as sharp as mine, you could hear it cutting the air as it fell. The mountain gods looked down and smiled. I wore a shabby look, which resembled that of any locale that had let go of his appearance a long time ago. As I felt the wind chill in my neck, I pulled my collars up to keep my ears warm as my beard swayed in the wind callously marking the insanity that I had entered in to.
The man is walking carefully, his senses alert. But he was not slow. From the distance I could see that he was a foreigner, a Lat Sahib, because he wore faded green trousers with a faded grey shirt and his head is adorned by a hat. He had a stick in his hand which he is held above the ground that swayed with his walk. A gun slung across his shoulders. He is quite tall and slim.
I knew who he was. Not that I had met him or come across him previously. But I knew from what I had heard from others that he is the Lat Sahib who has been putting up in the neighbouring village for the past three weeks. He had come here to kill the man-eater. He was good at it too – had killed many so far. I thought he was good because tigers were attracted to him. So they gave him a chance to kill them.
In a way the man-eater had contributed to the silence. In the past three years, this tiger had killed and eaten more than two hundred people from the hills. From that particular town itself, it had killed nineteen people. The last that it took was a young girl who had gone with ten or so other women in the afternoon to collect fuel wood. While they were doing so, the tiger stalked them. It followed them, silent like death, creeping like death and then springing with the suddenness of death. The women knew about its presence only when it had already grabbed the girl by her throat and was dragging her away. The remaining women shouted and screamed and stampeded back to the village, while the girl remained silent because she had her throat in the tiger’s jaws. By the time the men were summoned and a few of them summoned their courage and a search party was formed, the tiger had already soused its hunger completely. So what they brought back was just a few bits of flesh and a few bones and her red coloured clothes. She was cremated right there in the village itself because everyone was terrified of venturing farther than that.
Because of the man-eater, people didn’t move much. Men did go to their fields and women did go to collect sticks and leaves and grass. Because if you stop all that you would die anyway. But everyone was on their guard and tense all the time. And no one spent more time than necessary outdoors. By four in the afternoon, the doors were closed and people were already inside as a ghostly hushing hung outside the doors and floated in the streets. Tigers mostly don’t stir in the afternoon. They begin moving only just before sundown. But this one was unpredictable. The last victim that it took, she was taken when the afternoon hadn’t even started blushing. So people stood indoors even in the afternoons unless they had to step out. Traffic between villages had come to a halt – close relatives didn’t visit even in marriage ceremonies. Celebrations were less while cremations were more. I however was not scared and wondered if the tiger was watching me at that instant.
Since people had almost stopped visiting nearby villages, the traffic on this path had dwindled. As it is, it used to be deserted almost all the time even otherwise. But now, even the one or two who would pass during any given day are gone. The silence here is complete. Shiv Shakti was the last resort before one would enter the tiger territory.
Not that afternoon needed any assistance for its silence. In fact the silence of the afternoon was deeper than the silence of the night. Most people thought that it is the night that spreads more silence. But they couple the absence of light with the silence and reach their conclusions. Silence in the afternoon is deeper even with the light being harsh. In the night the tiger, the leopard the jackals hunt. It is the howls of the hyenas that make the night silence eerie. The bears are constantly on the move searching for food and their grunts and other sounds carry in the night. The hunted give alarm calls and run. Only the birds sleep. In the afternoon, all take shelter from the sun and conserve energy. Even the birds that filled the very air with their songs go silent. The only birds that seem unaffected are the crow, the woodpecker, the drongo, the blue jay, the bee eater and the egret.
The man was near my rock now. If my ears were not sharp, I wouldn’t have heard him. He was slowing down, looking at me. So I knew that he would stop and talk to me.
“Keeping a watch on the cows?” he asked.
“Buffalos,” I told him. He was sun burnt and very handsome. And he knew a bit of the local our language.
“Uh…huh,” he says. He took out a packet of cigarettes. I took out my packet as he lit up a cigarette. He looked at me disdainfully but didn’t comment.
“Got to keep alert.” He said “The buffalos went that way. ”
I looked at him. He knew very well which side Jindu buffalos must have wanders. Behind me were the hills and the temple atop it. It is a completely rocky terrain and buffalos won’t go up there because there was no grass. In front of me was the dense jungle that had enticed me so often but the stories of the tiger had kept me away. An odd tinkling or two of their bells is still audible from that side. But I knew why he is asking the question. When two strangers meet, inanities are the perfect tool to dissolve the initial awkwardness. I indicated which way they had wandered with a nod of my head.
“How long have you been a shepherd?” he asked me. “Idiot, thinks I am a shepherd.” I thought as I looked at him with a strange look but decided to play the game. I was feeling heady and didn’t want to tell him why I was here in the mountains or what I was searching. The fact was I knew that the tiger wasn’t going to harm me. My time hadn’t come and yet I wasn’t willing to take the risk of walking across the path and go that water fall that had lured me so many times before.
“The buffalos started knowing me from the time I was a child,” I lied.
He takes a good look at me now. “How long will you be here?” he asked.
I look at the shadows wondering if he wanted to know when I was headed back to the plains or just back to the guest house. “Two hours more. Then the buffalos will start coming back to this rock.” I hoped so. Jindu and his buffalos were a nuisance and I had secretly wished that the tiger would take them out one by one just the way predator had taken out Arnie’s team in the movie “Predator.”
“You always sit on this rock? Every day?” he was beginning to annoy me as the colours of the sky had started to change. The mountains were turning pink. Soon it was going to be dark.
“The rock has taken the character of my buttocks,” I smiled.
He laughed .
“You are very different from the rest of the villagers. The others treat me deferentially. Obsequiously. You don’t. Why is that?” had he realised I wasn’t one of them.
“Do the buffalos treat you different from the other men?” I asked him back portraying to be Jindu’s shepherd.
He shook his head.
“Then they know better than my fellow villagers,” I told him.
He laughed again. And I could tell he is really enjoying himself. I smiled wondering how much I had changed. I was being taken for an ordinary villager. I wondered if I stayed on for long enough would I become just like Jindu. Perhaps I would marry his daughter and live happily ever after, I didn’t want my life to end in that hill district or the village as this guy had termed it as. Where was the tiger? Wasn’t he hungry?
“You think a lot?” he asked me.
“There is nothing else here to do.” I answered trying to be polite. I wanted him to leave but as luck would have it he seemed to have all the time in the world at this point where the town came to an end and the so called tiger territory started.
He threw his cigarette as he understood, I wasn’t in a mood to make chit chat. He straightened his stick. As I fiddled on my empty packet for another cigarette, I realised I had run out of smokes. He understood and offered me one.
“Smoke this when you feel like relaxing,” he said. “By the way, the man-eater is in this area right now. I saw his fresh pugmarks on this very path just ahead of me. Probably he heard me coming and so wandered off in the direction your buffalos are. I went in the jungle tracing his pugmarks but lost the trail after sometime,” he looked at me seriously. I wondered if he was trying to pull my leg. I had been there for almost two hours and if any of those cows were not coming back, I wasn’t going back in to the jungle looking for them.
Then, before he started on his way again, he yelled, “Take care.”
Only I and the tiger have the ears to hear his footfall. alcohol if made your reflexes sluggish, it enhanced your power of hearing for sure. I was pretty definite I could hear god if I tried hard enough too.
What I had told him was true. There is nothing here to do except think. The silence in the afternoon was so thick that it pushes your thoughts up. Villagers who are Moslem tell me that Mohammed was a shepherd. And I think that the Jesus that the white man believes in was also a shepherd. I could understand. Only shepherds can form new religions. Their thoughts are precipitated by the silence of the afternoon. In a way it is silence that gives rise to new religions. I looked at the cigarette and decided to light it up. It was a heady combination of dope , tiger scare and the thought of becoming a spiritual guru. Pretty soon the snow would start to melt and the town would start to fill up with newlyweds who shall be fed with endless tales of the man eater, each man telling a different story of how it was captured , what role he had played in it or if it was still at large, how they should lock their rooms at night. There was still time a month or so perhaps and this man seemed to be promising.
I look to my left. The man was just on the verge of disappearing around the bend. His footmarks were clear in the loose soil. If the tiger could read the pugmarks, he could catch up with him. I wondered who was following whom as I got up to look at my watch. It was getting late. The buffalos should be on their way back. I wondered why I was suddenly getting worried about Jindu’s buffalos. They were after all his buffalos and if it weren’t for the dope, I would have definitely not been able to sleep at night.
A blue jay arrived on the tree in front and looked around for insects. It made a few dives but came up with nothing in the beak. Then it started to shriek. Its mate replied from somewhere in the jungle. But something made me look to the left again. The man-eater has suddenly appeared there. It is walking unhurriedly. Then it too disappeared around the bend. Was I dreaming? I had just seen the ever elusive stripes and that too a man eater. Why he didn’t choose me as his afternoon snack, I wondered. Perhaps tiger just like any other predator smells for fear or a weapon. If unarmed he would not attack you just like the predator in the movie. Or perhaps he didn’t want to get doped and made a easy target. The rules of the game were simple. Eliminate the threat first, easy could wait.
There is no way that I could warn the hunter– the tiger was between me and him. And in any case, if his instinct was like that which made me look suddenly to the left, he would know of the tiger’s presence automatically. And even otherwise, I knew one thing – taught to me by nature, by the silence, by my long observations and by my thoughts. What happens happens. You can do zilch to change it.
I may as well enjoy that cigarette now. As I took a drag I heard a faint roar, then a gun fire. I saw the man walking back in a triumph; I knew the tiger was dead. I knew in the fleeting seconds that the tigers eyes had met mine, I knew it now, he had walked to his death sparing me .
The autopsy of the body revealed a broken hind leg that had become infected, that had led it to become a man eater. Perhaps the pain had become unbearable. Perhaps he had heard the conversation between the hunter and me. Perhaps he wanted to go out like the king of the jungle. Who knew ?
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